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Help for Small Businesses – thinking outside of the box

Be open-minded and give careful thought to how you can improve your processes

It may be a hard pill to swallow when you realise that your admin procedures, which may have been in place for many years, are now one of the main contributing factors to your businesses’ low productivity and levels of poor efficiency. It doesn’t, however, necessarily mean that you are going to need to invest heavily in new automated processes and intensive staff training to turn things around.

With an open-minded approach, an assessment of the core problem areas, and some careful thought and planning that will stream-line your processes, you’ll be surprised how quickly you can achieve positive change.

All businesses need to adapt to the changing demands of consumers and their purchase behaviour. Nothing stays the same forever, and this is indeed true for your admin processes as well. The first task is to identify which admin processes are under strain and are having a negative impact on your business.

These are some common areas which can cause bottle necks in processes and dissatisfaction amongst customers:

Inadequate staffing due to sickness, holiday or inefficient rota systems which can cause a rise in stress levels and low staff morale

Inadequate staff training which can also result in low morale but will ultimately lead to low levels of customer satisfaction

Poor team leadership and management

Heavily resourced processes that require a lot of manual intervention to complete

Lack of uniformity in procedures for processes which are repeated regularly by different people, such as sales order processing, resolving customer complaints.

It’s a good idea to create a flow chart for all your internal processes as this can help you to identify where the problems are occurring. Mapping out the process in this way will make it much easier to drill down to the problem and solve it quickly and effectively.

Here is a good example of a business process flow chart for a customer order to shipping:

In this example, each step of the order process is identified, and there is quite a paper trail, but this is just taking us through to the shipping of the order. This flow chart doesn’t include the invoice process, chasing for payment, receiving payment or dealing with a customer query following the placement of the order. So what happens if the order is lost and the customer doesn’t receive the goods? ‘What happens if …?’ Unfortunately, you can’t foresee every scenario that may present itself following placement of an order, but you should be able to identify issues that have arisen in the past to outline a procedure that can effectively deal with them when required.

Effective Team Management

Stream-lining your processes and ensuring your staff are fully trained to manage each and every step, a process will improve productivity and work-flow efficiency, however, a business can’t run itself – it needs intelligent, motivated and driven people at the helm to steer it forwards. Effective Team Management is an area which is often over-looked by business owners and is possibly one of the most common root causes of low productivity in the workplace.

It can be a real challenge to create a new team or step into someone else’s shoes and take over their managerial role, and if your managers haven’t had any formal leadership training or don’t have a natural flair to inspire and motivate others, then this can lead to productivity issues amongst lower ranking staff.

Choosing the right people for the job is key to achieve business success, and being able to accurately analyse the skills and abilities of your applicants before offering them the job or the promotion, could save you time, money and further staffing issues down the line.

Process Evaluation, Problem Solving, and Effective Team Management are just some of the services from a broad portfolio of business support options provided by Alexanders Business Support. From ad hoc admin support to independent reviews and risk management, the team at Alexanders will assess your business and identify the areas which can be improved to provide workable solutions that are within your budget and which will help you to achieve your business goals.

Alexanders Business Support offer FREE initial consultations, so please contact Wendy or Dave on 07775 804353 to book your business consultation or visit the website for further information http://alexandersbizsupport.co.uk/